Ramen Champion: A Challenge between Ramen Contenders

17 September 2013

At a recent visit to Ramen Champion, I came to realize that: good stuff never last forever…. because the better stuff is coming your way next.

While the irony that I haven’t tasted ramen during my trip to Japan in the earlier half of this year, I was pretty excited to find out what ramen taste like.

Many ramen joints in Singapore were cooked to suit the local taste, somehow tweaked their recipes that it may not taste anywhere near to the real ramen anymore, so I came to find that, Ramen Champion may be the only place in Singapore to taste that authentic story of the Japanese ramen.

The Chefs in Ramen Champion are individually quite unique.
Besides being contenders for the title of Ramen Champion, they are authentic Japanese passionate in their art of Ramen. Each Ramen chef has their own distinctive and signature ramen so you definitely will not get that ‘same-kind-of-ramen-different-kind-of-soup-base’ kind of situation.

In this visit, I managed to try 2 kinds of new ramen (there were 3 new ramen, but one of them was beef, and I don’t eat beef~) and Chef Bario’s most popular Ajitama Ramen.

Now mentioning Chef Bario, can you imagine he had sold 60,600 bowls of ramen in one year alone?
The number is pretty mind-boggling.

So here are the mighty bowls from the new contenders:

Pork Nikumashi Ramen by Buta God

This is called Nikumashi Ramen… Pork slices with a nice half-boiled egg in a savoury miso broth with a hint of sweet.
What I like about this ramen is that it wasn’t the slice char-shu ramen I was pretty familiar with, rather, the pork in this ramen was thinly sliced, wavy length chewy pork strips, which was pretty interesting.

Pork Nikumashi Ramen by Buta God

This masterpiece comes from a new contender in the ring: Buta God.
The name of the Chef himself is kind of intimidating, and you definitely can feel that power in this bowl.

Tsukemen special dipping ramen by Menban Yamagishi Kazuo

The one that caught my interest right from the beginning was this dipping sauce ramen.

I mean, ramen usually would come in soup, ain’t it?

I do know soba or udon does have their dipping sauces, so ramen having a dipping sauce version is a concept pretty novel to me.

What I do like about this dipping sauce ramen besides the generous amount of leeks is the fragrant. When I scoop some sauce into my own bowl and literally just soak some ramen noodles in there; then pulling them out with my chopsticks, a distinctive sesame aroma fills my nostrils.

And it’s not that usual kind of refined sesame oil, there was something rustic about it, I’m not exactly sure what it was but my brain registered the word “roasted sesame” to me, and I just felt that was it.

The sesame fragrant combine with the salty miso taste and the crunchy leeks was definitely refreshing.

The most interesting part about it is that you can add some soup stock later and transform this bowl of sauce into a bowl of soup. Talking about innovation, this new kid on the block has it!

Ajitama Ramen by Bario

Of course, the highly anticipated ramen of the night is this bowl of ramen with a Mount Fuji worthy of bean sprouts. I was pretty surprised by the ramen, flat broad noodles which reminds me of the kind of ‘lor-mee’ noodles, the chinese yellow flat broad noodles; but with a much chewy texture.

I like that it has a lot of bean sprouts, I guess it’s still a habit of a women to reach out to more vegetables.

The soup was the least salty compared to the others and more acceptable by my taste buds.

However, really, the level of saltiness one can accept is pretty subjective. My day-to-day meals are with minimal salt, so it was pretty overwhelming for me to take on the challenge of authentic ramen.

However, I do notice native Japanese who patrons Ramen Champion to have ramen after their usual round of beer. I guess the bitter malty taste of beer offsets the saltiness of ramen which would be the best combination yet!

Besides ramen, we also had orders of gyozas and other side dishes at Ramen Champion.

Pan-fried Gyozas

Deep-fried gyozas

Honestly, I preferred the pan-fried version to the deep fried ones.

I like the crispiness of the pan-seared bottom mixed with the soft chew of the gyoza wrapper, and the textures complimented very much with the filling inside.

I do recommend that you head to Ramen Champion with a few friends, not only you get to taste a couple of different ramen at one go, but you too can be a food critic and cast your vote for your favourite Ramen chef!

Cast your votes for your favourite Ramen Chef!

Lastly I wish to thank Ramen Champion for this generous invite, and all the best to all Ramen contenders!!

Bloggers with Chef Bario — Photo credits to Ramen Champion

Disclaimer: Dinner compliments of Ramen Champion. No monetary compensation was received. Opinions stated are genuine and honest. Also note that all sources, information, content, links are accurate at the time of posting.

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About the author

Pingerrain also known as Priscilla is a Singapore-based Travel and Lifestyle blogger. Her passions are diverse but travel, craft/art and photography/video/film are the umbrellas of what she loves.

She loves to write and dreams of publishing her own novels as well as turning her scripts into films.

She's also one big Disney fan!

Priscilla graduated from B(A) in Communications and currently working in the travel industry on marketing, social media and design.

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